Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Living The Big Sky Life: I Could Run But I Couldn't Hide

I discovered
early on that one of the easiest ways to get a pulse on the inherent cultural
nuances of the Whitefish community
in 1992 was to simply read the local weekly paper, the Whitefish Pilot. I
personally found 82-year old Ida Hunnewell’s “Olney Briefs” column to be especially enchanting. And who wouldn’t?
An Olney native herself, Ida proudly reported the social goings-on of those
born and bred in her tiny town of Olney (15 miles northwest of Whitefish) with
the unsophisticated simplicity of a fifth grader.

Living the big sky life in a small town like Whitefish meant that just
about everyone knew where I lived and worked. It was unavoidable. The kind of
work I did, however, meant that if I wanted to protect my personal time, I had
to keep my home phone number private. By carelessly allowing my home number to
become public knowledge, I would’ve been forced to fight against the assumption
of the local real estate agents that I was on call and available
for business and problem solving 24/7 - a challenge effectively circumvented
with an unlisted home phone number. The only person who knew that phone number
was my assistant Joan, and she’d
been given strict instruction not to share it with anyone for any reason, no
matter how pushy they got or how much they begged. And faithful Joan never surrendered
it.

When
it came to the delivery of packages, on the other hand, it was admissibly convenient
for both the postman and the FedEx delivery lady to know where I lived and
worked; and they somehow always seemed to know where I was at any given moment.
There were more than several occasions when the postman showed up at my office
so that I could sign for a package that had been addressed to my home, or when I
saw the FedEx lady drive her big delivery truck down my long dirt driveway to
deliver a package to me at home that had been sent to my office.

My
moderately multi-cultural upbringing in The OC gave me a pretty open-minded and tolerant approach to diversity when it
came to people, their belief systems, and their lifestyle preferences. I
arrived in Montana taking much of that social conditioning for granted, and I naïvely
made the mistake of assuming most
Americans operated under a similar premise until I rudely realized, of course,
that they did not. Not only was good ole boy intolerance the norm in big sky country, there appeared to be
no need or desire to change the way things had been done since Custer tried to take
out the original Americans at Little Bighorn.

White
alone -(99%)

Hispanic
-
(2.8%)

Two
or more races -(1.6%)

American
Indian alone -(0.7%)

Asian
alone -(0.7%)

Black
alone -(0.5%)

Native
Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone -(0.06%)

Other
race alone -(0.05%)

Every
year the Whitefish Pilot was known to publish the town’s census statistics
by race. This was something I’d never
seen before, and yet I was utterly fascinated with its blatant (and proud) lack
of diversity. In spite of any compulsory public show of political correctness,
the truth was, anyone who was different
didn’t tend to last long enough to make the paper a year later.

As
hard as some tried to sustain the pretense of political correctness, it couldn’t
completely cover up the area’s shadowed past, for truth has the strangest way
of rising to the surface in spite of all attempts to suppress it … kind of like
a mushroom sprouting from a pile of dung.

One
big mushroom that comes to mind involved a sales transaction I closed for a lot
along the shoreline of Coon Lake, a few miles west of town. I know water front
property is supposed to be all the rage, but whatever water front property was
claimed to exist around this lake was, in my opinion, a joke. It was, hands
down, the ugliest algae infested tully lake I’d ever seen - good only for breeding
mosquitoes and the bass that feed upon them. By the time this escrow had opened
and Joan had ordered the title work, I’d closed quite a few transactions
around Coon Lake and gave little thought to the place, let alone where the name
of the lake came from. I simply assumed it was short for ‘raccoon’ or
‘coondog’.

When
I got the title prelim a week later, I began casually reviewing it for closing
conditions as was customary, but something wasn’t right, and I kept saying that
out loud to Joan. The exceptions listed in the report were not the usual Coon
Lake exceptions, and when I got to the plat map, I just about lost it. What was
this???

The
plat map read Nigger Lake, not Coon Lake. I turned to Joan, a Whitefish
native, and demanded answers.

By
the time I pulled my eyes away from the prelim report to look at her, Joan had
turned her head away from me and cowered over her desk with her hand blocking
the side of her face I was looking at, ashamed and reluctant to talk about awful
things that she wished had been buried along with their sordid past. Nothing
she personally had anything to do with, but apparently some unsavory things
she’d been witness to as a young girl.

Joan told me that the reason this prelim was different than every other Coon Lake
transaction we’d previously closed was because this sale was from an original
owner and the title work had never been dated down to the present day like all
the others. After this sale closed, the report I saw would no longer exist and
all future title work for the property would be from the date of closing
onward.

As
for the name of the lake, she believed it had been originally named because of the
lynchings that had been known to occur on its shores during the first part of
the century. It was changed in the 1960’s after the federal government required
all states to be in compliance with the Civil Rights Act; meaning any inappropriately
named lake, waterway, park, etc. would need to be changed to something that was considered racially neutral and not derogatory. Apparently Nigger Lake, Nigger River, and Nigger Road
in upstate New York were overlooked by the 1960’s compliance police. And then there are the private exceptions, such as Texas governor Rick Perry’s Niggerhead Ranch…

Undoubtedly,
the Montana Moby Dicks of the 1960’s
pulled a fast one on the federal government by selecting the name of Coon Lake, for no one seemed to catch the poorly disguised slur. Given my original
assumption about the name however, I can hardly find fault with the enforcers in
Washington way back when. Maybe they’d been naïve too. Either that or well paid
off.

In
the end, I think the good ole boy intolerance that permeated just about
everything took a huge toll on me. It bred limitation in every possible way,
and for someone like me, that limitation felt like incarceration. No wonder I couldn’t wait to escape.

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About Me

A born storyteller of Irish American descent, author DK King brings to the written page a refreshing, unique, and embracing style of literary art that captivates the reader with a relevant, yet visionary, mixture of wit and wisdom.